With a captivating cosmic sketch and shimmering scenes of the sea, this program immerses us in the mystery of ‘musical landscape’, accompanied by Chopin’s bewitching Piano Concerto No.2 exquisitely performed by Lise de la Salle. 

With his Vers la voûte étoilée (To the Starry Dome), Koechlin, who was fascinated with astronomy in his youth, created a magnetic opus in the form of a nocturne for orchestra. The mystery of seduction is echoed in Debussy’s, La Mer (The Sea), an incomparable and sensual prismatic spray of sound, for which the notion of ‘musical impressionism’ was forged.

Britten’s marine interludes, from his opera Peter Grimes, further evoke the changing shimmer of the sea, from grey dawn to glittering moonlight and the wild breaking of the swell. The programme then unleashes the full charm of Chopin’s epic and belcantist Concerto No.2. Its poetic summit, the Larghetto, offers its supple and sustained cantilena, characteristic of the art of ‘the Trilby of pianists’, as Berlioz whimsically called Chopin.